Ecuador

The largest protests – and by far the longest-lasting – against Rafael Correa’s government have been raging all over Ecuador since August 13th, when hundreds of thousands of people in a national strike called by the Indigenous People’s organizations and Labor Unions, took to the streets in Quito and other parts of the country. The goal was to vociferously show their discontent with a number of government policies and demand reforms.

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Franco-Brazilian academic and journalist Manuela Picq has been arrested at an Indigenous march in Ecuador and is facing deportation. She was accompanying her partner at the march and pursuing journalistic investigation of the Indigenous movement. Update August 17th: Today a judge ruled Manuela Picq will not be deported from Ecuador.

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Ecuador’s Indigenous movements have launched an uprising to challenge the government’s opposition to bilingual education and its support for an extractive-based economy.

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It seems hard to believe, but it’s been twenty years since the resistance to the large-scale open pit copper mining project began in Intag. Two decades. Almost a generation.

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On April 20, U.S. attorney Steven Donziger will help defend one of the most historic class-action court judgments against a large corporation: Ecuador’s Supreme Court decision in 2011 that holds Chevron liable for $9.6 billion of damages for environmental harms affecting an estimated 30,000 Amazonian people.

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The government of President Rafael Correa achieved what seemed impossible since the late 1990s: it reunited Ecuador’s Indigenous movements. Yet, this was not likely the intended goal of evicting the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) from its headquarters.

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The Ecuadorian government has announced that it is giving the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) two weeks to abandon the headquarters it has held for almost a quarter of a century. The CONAIE leadership says that they will refuse to leave.

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The government of President Rafael Correa in Ecuador has called for the CONAIE indigenous movement to leave its headquarters in Quito. CONAIE leader Jorge Herrera says this is a political move on the part of the government to repress the indigenous movement and marginalize critics. Here is an open letter to Correa from Boaventura de Sousa Santos on the topic.

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